What Makes a Bad Book Good?

[sartorias]

I saw a discussion posted on this topic, but by the time I'd discovered it, it had already been taken over by some folks who wanted to brangle about whether or not Harry Potter was "bad" or "good"--each implying their own taste was the standard all should use

Comments

[lacylu42]

I can get behind your hypothesis! For me, a recent one was "Twilight;" a lot of things about the writing bugged me, but the plot was so quick and the story somehow so engrossing that I was addicted. I couldn't put it down!

Part of that was probably that I didn't have to work very hard while reading it.

My writer brain knew that some of the tropes (the beautiful vampires, the heroine who doesn't realize that she's beautiful, the love at first sight, the special power over the vamp that the heroine doesn't know she has… etc.) were ridiculously clichéd, but I kept reading! Long into the night when I should have been sleeping.

I have not, however, picked up any of the sequels.

[sartorias]

Yep--these tropes are effective for a reason. What intrigues me are tropes that have fallen out of fashion, and no longer fit the culture. Looking at books that were popular but not included among classics of the past are mines of this sort of thing.

[asakiyume]

Besides the books you mentioned above, have you read any other forgotten best-sellers? I was thinking about what other tropes would sink a book like a load of bricks these days, and I though, how about White Man's Burden? Can you imagine that in a book nowadays? But then I wondered if that ever did figure as a trope, or only as a poem...

[sartorias]

Trilby (du Maurier), Dodo (Benson), the swashbucklers of Leslie Whyte, , Hugh Walpole's efforts...there are lots of them. Max Beerbohm once said something, at the height of his stellar career, about how awful it would be to be forgotten.

[asakiyume]

So--sorry, I'm Ms. Demanding today--what are some of the outdated tropes in some of those?

[sartorias]

they're all social--what a lady can and cannot do, certain societal and emotional stereotypes. (the social climber who will always betray their common roots by some vulgarity, etc.)